ED PALM | Leaders who understand the "rain"

People sometimes find it confusing when I tell them that the coldest I’ve ever been was in Vietnam. The “hawk” would come out on monsoon nights near the DMZ. That is what we used say when the wind was blowing and it was raining sideways, drenching and chilling us to the bone. Just to make matters worse, the Marine Corps, in its infinite wisdom, didn’t issue us effective rain gear or warm clothes. Vietnam is in the tropics, after all. The actual temperature may have only been in the 50s, but I have never felt wetter, colder, or more miserable than I did “in country.”

It was with some trepidation, therefore, that I decided to take a job in the great Northwest. An old Marine Corps friend from Portland, however, sought to reassure me with the standard Chamber of Commerce spiel. He pointed out that St. Louis, where I was living at the time, actually has a higher annual rainfall than Portland or Seattle. It is just that the majority of the rain in the Northwest is concentrated in the winter months. “Next you’ll be telling me that it’s a dry rain!” I scoffed.

Sometimes in life we all have to eat our words. Having endured seven wet winters in Silverdale, my wife and I are wintering in Virginia, where our first grandchild has just been born. That is the upside of being here. The downside is that we have been reacquainted with the winter rain here on the Eastern Seaboard. And I am now ready to proclaim the great paradox of the Northwest: It is indeed a dry rain that falls upon Silverdale!

The odd thing about the rain in the Northwest is that it rarely feels humid when it is raining. Not so here in Virginia. The relative humidity stays higher; the air temperature is often lower. Also, unlike rain in the Northwest, too often when it rains here it pours — driving down on me the way it did in Vietnam. Add a stiff wind, and the windchill factor makes this a wetter rain all the way around.

All this, by some odd conjunction, reminds me of one of the great anti-war anthems of the Vietnam War era, Creedence Clearwater’s “Who’ll Stop the Rain?” Metaphorically speaking, those who were there thought we would “stop the rain” — stop our government from blundering into any more ill-conceived and misguided wars. But our war was misappropriated, and we were co-opted by the right-wing members of our generation who had better things to do than to serve in Vietnam. That is why I, for one, am glad that a Vietnam veteran is now our Secretary of State and, as of this writing, another one is likely to become our Secretary of Defense.

As a Vietnam veteran myself, I don’t lend much credence to the media dubbed “swift boaters” who torpedoed John Kerry’s presidential bid in 2004. He may have exaggerated his combat experience, and I do understand why some cannot get past the prominent role he played in the anti-war movement. But he did serve in Vietnam, and he did speak out about the misapprehensions and misrepresentations that got us bogged down in that dubious cause. I am confident that, as Secretary of State, he would ground our foreign policy in the most important lesson of Vietnam — that winning hearts and minds for America requires an understanding of, and respect for, other cultures.

Likewise, I am not concerned about the baggage Chuck Hagel brings to the office of Secretary of Defense. I understand that he has been critical of Israel, that he has advocated negotiating with Iran, and that he broke ranks with his own party over the Iraq War. The Secretary of Defense, however, does not get to determine our foreign policy, and to my mind, all these concerns are more than offset by his major qualification for the job. He has had firsthand, grunt-level experience with the human cost of war. He knows what it is like to try to implement ill-conceived policies and a self-defeating strategy. I doubt that he would ever place his loyalty to the president over his responsibility to the troops, much less try to sell us on a war he knows to be unwinnable. Another Robert McNamara Hagel is not.

I do wish Hagel had come on stronger before the Senate Armed Services Committee. But, then again, I will take his reticence over Cheney’s glib bravado and Rumsfeld’s cavalier indifference to the overcommitment of our troops.

A line Yeats wrote in 1919 still speaks to our condition today: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” I’ll settle for a Secretary of Defense who hits a happy medium.